Saturday, October 06, 2012

ANIMATION & GAMING INDUSTRY: INDIA LAGS BEHIND

Despite Tremendous Potential, Indian Animation and Gaming Industry is still at a Nascent Stage as Compared to the Global Market calling for Some Quick and Radical Steps to Get Going.

There is another key factor that is working against the Indian animation industry at the moment; and that is lack of support from the domestic film industry. Though many of the industry people still believe that the Indian audience is not yet ready for such movies, box office reports have a different story to say. For example, while no Indian animation movie (with due apologies to Bal Hanuman, Ramayana – The Epic and Toonpur Ka Superrhero) witnessed a proper all India theatrical release in the past couple of years, Hollywood animation movies like Ice Age 3 and Monsters vs Aliens enjoyed huge success on Indian soil. For that matter, Avatar mopped up over Rs.1 billion from India and did really well even when it was launched in regional languages. And the less one talks about Indian animation movies in US, the better – there’s none in history that has ever released in the US.

Smita Maroo, VP – Animation, Shilpa Shemaroo Entertainment, tells B&E, “Budgets are a problem in India, whereas Hollywood films like Avatar have good financial backing.” A Deloitte research report corroborates the viewpoint, mentiong, “Indian animation movie are low budget (Rs.100-120 million) movies, primarily meant to hedge the involved financial risks. In doing so, the quality takes a beating and the movie fails to compete with a $100-200 million Hollywood production.”

Meanwhile, the next big thrust for the animation industry is expected to emerge from the domestic gaming industry, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 53% over the next few years to reach $1.3 billion by CY 2013 from just $239 million in CY 2009 backed by higher Internet penetration. Furthermore, with 3G services set to spread wings across the country, the mobile gaming industry too is all set to catch up fast. Going by a research report published by Tata Strategic Management Group for Italian Trade Commission, Indian mobile gaming market, which was estimated at $66 million in 2009, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 66% to $496 million by 2013. Even in the Internet gaming and social media sites, the gaming culture is widely increasing and on an average, players are now spending 40% of their time on these sites.

However, despite this growth, Indian animation and gaming industry will still be less than 2% of the global industry by 2013. While on one hand, this recognises a huge and long term growth opportunity for India in this field, on the other hand, this also implies that we are lagging behind the global growth model. Says Shubhoshekhar Bhattacharjee, CEO, Planman Motion Pictures (whose superhit movie, Do Dooni Char, was the first movie distributed by Disney in India), “Another aspect that can be of great use for the Indian players at present is that overseas giants like Sony, Imax and Walt Disney have started outsourcing their major work to India.” An example is Rainbow Production, an Italian producer has outsourced an entire film Tommy and Oscar to Toonz Animation Studio from Kerala. Similarly, Nipuna Service, a subsidiary of Satyam Computer Services, is now handling almost 90% of New Zealand-based animation company Applied Gravity’s works. But, the scale is still very miniscule, which clearly points out that Indian animation and gaming industry has to first deal with its inherent problems including manpower crunch, funds and lack of government support before it can match up with the global growth trajectory.